Multiplicities of charged pions and charged hadrons from deep-inelastic scattering of muons off an isoscalar target

Abstract

Multiplicities of charged pions and charged hadrons produced in deep-inelastic scattering were measured in three-dimensional bins of the Bjorken scaling variable x, the relative virtual-photon energy y and the relative hadron energy z. Data were obtained by the COMPASS Collaboration using a 160 GeV muon beam and an isoscalar target ( 6 LiD). They cover the kinematic domain in the photon virtuality Q 2 > 1 (GeV/c) 2 , 0.004 < x < 0.4, 0.2 < z < 0.85 and 0.1 < y < 0.7. In addition, a leading-order pQCD analysis was performed using the pion multiplicity results to extract quark fragmentation functions.